Jerry Ferraz hosts Bird & Beckett’s bi-monthly poetry reading and open mic, this week featuring Zigi Lowenberg working with Oakland pianist Bill Crossman. An open mic follows.

Lowenberg was raised in Queens and then relocated to the Bay Area from East Village in Manhattan, and now she’s back in NYC. She’s traveling west in January to read in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Lowenberg comes from a family in which the women were heavily involved in politics. Her mother was involved in fair housing issues and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

She has worked since 1990 in collaboration with her husband, Raymond Nat Turner in the poetry and jazz ensemble called Upsurge. From New York, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, and Ghana, West Africa, Upsurge has performed nationally and internationally, collaborating across disciplines of jazz, poetry, history and politics. “Raymond and Zigi have such respect for the words and tradition,” said Benny Watson, piano player with UpSurge! “It’s really a pleasure working with them.”

Bill Crossman, pianist, composer, and educator, is an innovator in freely improvised jazz piano. He has performed with some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians and has appeared in performance venues and festivals from coast to coast and internationally. He currently teaches at Berkeley City College and the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music (OPCM), and he hosts OPCM’s free-jazz/free-improv monthly open-mike sessions. Bill is currently a member of the India Cooke – Bill Crossman Duo, B-FREE, the Ritual Resurrection Band, and the Troublemakers Union.